


The Fifth Chamber of the Human Heart

by yuletide_archivist



Category: We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-24
Updated: 2007-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:50:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1625183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today should have been a day of cups and concavities, but it became a day of sharpness and shards.  Merricat reads the omens in the kitchen, in the aftertime.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fifth Chamber of the Human Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to H. for the last-minute read!
> 
> Written for Unovis

 

 

I.

Today should have been a day of curves and concavities. In the morning, as Constance poured milk into the cup she always used, the liquid curled along the inside curve of it the way Jonas' tongue used to slide along my cheek, catching against the surface at first and then receding. 

My own cup was empty by then, my mouth sharp with the astringent aftertaste of my oversugared tea. 

("Merricat," Constance had asked me, "would you like a cup of tea?" She asked me this every morning, and every morning we fell against each other with our laughter.)

On mornings like this, mornings of curves and caves and cavities, I liked to stare down into the yellow bowl of my emptied cup as I waited for Constance to finish drinking her tea. The roundness of the cup made me think of a flower's bulb embedded in winter soil, or of the same flower's open summer over-blooming. Constance said that yellow reflected on my chin when I stared into my cup like that. I told her it meant I liked butter, and she smiled. 

"Do you like butter?" we had asked each other once, buttercups held beneath our faces, a jaundiced tinge across our chins saying always that we did, we did. Sometimes now we heard children or lovers asking each other the same question as they dirtied our lawn with their sprawl and steps, leaving the uprooted flowers behind them to die, or else tucking them into the tangle of their hair where they would fall out, forgotten, when they had gone back to the village. The villagers' feet trampled our buttercups into the dirty sidewalk until nothing remained but a powdery smear like spilled saffron.

I imagined the villagers dead then, too, severed, their viscera pulled apart the way Constance carefully unthreaded the latticework of weed-roots in the garden to make sure the weeds could not grow again.

"Should we start with the preserves today, or the pickles?" Constance asked, setting the milk bottle down on the table next to her plate, and I forgot about the buttercups and looked at her, at the curve of her left cheekbone and the deep concavity of the hollow beneath it. "What do you think?"

It was the fourth day, and on the fourth day we always went down into the basement and counted the seasons that the Blackwood women had left us, the peaches suspended like embryos in their thick and golden fluid, the spears of white asparagus pressed like fingers against the glass of their jars.

"The preserves," I said, thinking of all the round cavities of fruits, the deep curve of the squat jars of rosehip jelly that we stacked and restacked above the box of Uncle Julian's papers. The box, too, was a cave. I looked at the dulled inside of my spoon, at my blurred and inverted self half-smiling within it.

Constance smiled. "The preserves," she agreed. She lifted her tea as she always did, but then all our barricades fell away in an instant, became as low and useless as Roman walls against wilds and wilderness.

I thought the cup had slipped from her hand, but it hadn't. She still held the urn-curved handle, her pinky slightly outstretched, but the round cavity of the cup had slipped away from it. Between the muddy puddles of milky tea on the table I could see pieces of the cup's pattern in the fragments, orange flowers scattered over the table like the trail of freckles that ran along Constance's collarbones.

Today had become a day of sharpness and shards.

II.

Jonas had died on a day of crescents.

When I woke that day, he and I safe in our corner where we always slept, he was curved against the back my hip, but he did not move when I rolled over to stroke his chin. When I picked him up, his fur was still soft, but his skin stiff and cold beneath it. 

Constance looked up from the table where she sat kneading dough for the pastries she made that were shaped like horns, our third-day breakfast, crescents we dipped into our milk and tea. Because of this, the third day was often a day of crescents. I liked watching her fingers probe and push through the gluey dough, parting and folding it, her forearms taut from effort. I stood for a moment, watching, Jonas a light weight against my chest.

"Good morning, my Merricat," Constance said. "I saw a spider web on Uncle Julian's rosebush this morning. We should bring Jonas out there after breakfast and see if he can hunt down a spider for me. Poor Uncle Julian doesn't need spiders crawling on him."

"Jonas is dead."

Constance looked up, fingers still stuck deep within the dough. A streak of flour lined her face from eye to eye; she must have run her arm over her face as she was working. She was a Kabuki artist, my pantomime. From the open doorway, the early spring light filtered through her thin hair the same way it had filtered through the fringe-leaved willow branches in the grove where I had buried my last baby tooth and the first evidence of my bleeding.

"Don't be sad," Constance said. She was already crying. 

"I'm not," I said, but I let Constance hold me against her chest anyway, Jonas' body stiff between us, my face pressing against her shoulder. The cotton of her brown dress had worn so thin that I could feel the texture of her skin beneath it.

"Poor Jonas," she said. 

"It's all right," I said, "he's still alive on the moon."

"Oh, Merricat."

I pulled away from her. The swath of flour across her eyes, her nose, was now broken by tears and smudged indistinct from where she had pressed against me. Later, she said the flour that was left in my hair made me look like her, gray-streaked. I did not know. We did not have a mirror in the after-time.

"On the moon," she said, reaching out to stroke Jonas' head. 

"On the moon, Jonas has a heart that lasts forever. Everyone does. On the moon, everyone has an extra chamber in their hearts."

"Even cats?"

"Especially cats. People, too. Only real people, though. Not them."

She nodded. We had agreed long ago that she and I were the only humans left. We had let some of them trick us for a while, but no more.

"None of them," I said. 

We buried Jonas' body beneath the step that I had mended so that he could always choose between walls and wilderness. Constance fed me crescent-shaped rolls and milky tea, and we resumed our third-day routine, scrubbing the kitchen, airing our bedding.

As I smoothed out my bedclothes, I found the sheath of one of Jonas' claws hooked into my blanket, curved in on itself like a new moon.

I kept it beneath my pillow, wrapped in a tea towel with his skull. 

III.

Constance and I stared at each other. She still held the handle of the cup between her fingers like a severed ear.

"You called him here," I said. "The ghost."

She shook her head. "No," she said, "I didn't. I didn't mean to."

But I could sense that he was already coming. I could see him on the highway, his body grown fat, his soiled suit coat straining at the shoulders, his face shining with sweat and expectation. I thought of him coming closer to us and I imagined him dead, the column of the steering wheel puncturing his lungs and liver. 

Constance stood up slowly and got the broom, the handle of her cup now curved into her palm as she stooped to sweep up the shards of the cup. The handle was ragged where it had snapped, biting into her hand like a thorn. 

Now I could see that there were shards and sharpnesses everywhere: wood peeling off of boards in long splinters like cuticles separating from a fingernail; loose broom straws caught in the cracks of the walls; sunlight needling into the house in long, thin stripes from where the shutters could not close completely.

"We need to strengthen the barricade," I said. 

Constance stopped sweeping. A pintrail of blood traced down the underside of one of her fingers, welling into a round drop at the tip before streaking down the broom handle.

She looked at me for a moment, and we listened to the sudden openness of the world, the magpie-chatter of the fake people who had broken the frost with their footsteps as they crossed our lawn.

"The barricade," I said, "we need to finish it."

"Why?" she asked, but her eyes, wide, already agreed.

"It's an omen," I told her, throwing apart the doors to the cupboard where we kept the tools, the awls and the augurs, the slim boxes of nails.

It was an omen, I repeated to myself, reaching a hand into the box of nails, letting them roll and slip between my fingers. It was an omen.

But it was not the first.

IV.

"Merricat," Constance said as she came in, "guess what I found in the garden?"

I smiled at her. She smelled of smoke and tea, of the burnt autumn air. Dirt stained her fingers up to where her rings would sit, the rings I would make for her on the moon, filigreed or arabesqued, set with the stones of other worlds, scarab-bright with colors only she and I could see.

She put her basket down and held out her hand, palm up, fingers tightly curled. 

I tapped at her closed fist, a child guessing the hand in which a treat had been hidden, and Constance opened her fingers to show me one of my six blue marbles, its surface dulled by streaks of soil, a sullied globe with a deep nick cut across its northern hemisphere, near to where the pole should be. I imagined ice floes breaking apart with the noise of gunshots. I imagined the cut knifing like a leyline through our own globe, splintering our barricade, cleaving Uncle Julian's chair right down the middle, its wheel-spokes shedding rust like flakes of dried fish-scales as it fell.

I slapped her hand, sent the marble rolling lopsidedly into her corner of the kitchen.

"Merricat!," she said, laughing, "It's all right. It's just coming back to you. It missed you."

"No. It shouldn't have come back. It came up under through the barricade. It came back because I couldn't check on it. Now everything can come through."

"Silly Merricat! That's not true," she said, bending down to retrieve the marble. "This is ours. Only our things can make it through the barricades."

I didn't answer her. I had to think of a way to fix this. 

"Don't worry, my silly," Constance said, placing the marble on the table. "I'll make you a beet salad. And some eggs. And then maybe then some cookies with apricot jam."

The beets that Constance fed me, gem-deep red, tasted first of earth, as they always did, and then of metal. I imagined that she would slice open the next beet and find one of my silver coins embedded in it like a seed, like a core. Or else we would bite down on pieces of beetroot and open our mouths to show each other matching coins held between teeth and tongue, their silver faces stained red, our mouths red, too, like Jonas' mouth had been after a hunt.

"What if we found a coin inside the beets?" I asked Constance. 

The coins were the strongest magic except for my teeth. I could not ask about the teeth out loud. I tried to think of other words that I could think instead of teeth. Particle, I thought. Particular.

"Silly Merricat. That would never happen."

Particle. Particular. 

I frayed the hem of my tablecloth-dress. Maybe all my buried magicks would rise to the surface the way the bodies of the dead rose when the river plains flooded. I drifted into thought and planning, listening to the scratchy rhythm of Constance scrubbing the pie-pan we had found on the front doorstep several nights before. Cherry pie, I thought. Or blueberry.

"You know," Constance said, her back to me, "Cousin Charles thought it was wicked of you to bury all that money anyway."

She said it so evenly, as though it was a memory of Uncle Julian sitting in the garden on a good day and not a memory of a ghost, but her shoulders grew tight as soon as she realized what she had said.

I threw the third bowl against the wall, the extra bowl for company that never came. 

"Merricat! I didn't mean anything by it!" 

We did not speak again that day. I took my marble from the table as Constance picked up the shards of the bowl and I retreated to my corner. I ran my fingers over the imperfect sphere, thinking of the how the rest of the marbles must be stretched out now beneath the ground like a broken constellation.

I did not do enough that day. I was too eager to forgive her, to lay down with her again. At least I took one precaution.

Constance did not see that I had nailed a new board against the front door, narrowing the gap in the now-broken window. The board's rough edges scratched deep grooves along the inside of her arm when she reached through the opening to place the scoured dish back on the front step.

V.

The fifth chamber of the human heart neither contracts nor expands, but lies still, hidden between and beyond the ordinary heart, the vestigial organ that conceals our true nature beneath its flex and push. When our false hearts stop, arrested in that lopsided thump and thud, the fifth chamber remains intact, lined with the blood that will nurture us forever. On the moon, we live without the mess of heartbeats. 

This is what I told Constance as I sealed us into the kitchen.

All of the villagers, I told her, have only four chambers in their hearts. As I nailed new boards in place across the back stoop, as I pulled down the hallway around us, I killed them all. With each swing of the hammer I killed another, and another, pounding nails straight through their underdeveloped hearts. I saw them all clawing at their chests, all the Elberts and Dunhams and Donells, all their nameless and inhuman children. I drove the longest nail through the ghost's heart, hammered again and again until the dulled and bloodied point pinned him against the seat of his car.

The last time I saw the front step, there was a new dish there, covered with a white cloth, the stain of some dark berry seeping through the cloth as though through a bandage. 

The last time I saw the garden, the last golden bloom of Uncle Julian's rosebush was rusting beneath a veil of frost, its neck broken.

On the day of shards and sharpness I closed our barricade in on us, complete. There would be no more days, no Thursdays or Fridays, no third days or fourth days. The rest of the house would contract around us, knitting together like flesh, but our kitchen would remain intact. Ivy would overgrow the windows, tight as sinew. 

When I had sealed off the basement, the last opening, I lay next to Constance, our bodies curved like fishes, our hands cupped. 

In our chamber all was salt-dark and stillness and forever.

 


End file.
